The term is mainstream sport
It’s not 2004 anymore bro even if you wish it was
I think pride rules would draw negative attention from the media. I’m not sure I’d prefer it either, that shit makes me wince.
Same. I used to watch everything I could. Bought tapes of vale tudo and Japanese stuff back in the day. Went to japan multiple times for it, etc. I was hardcore for so many years and then suddenly in the last few I’ve more or less lost interest outside of an increasingly small number of fighters. I watched my first show in a while last weekend and it’s always the same now. Fighters badly losing on the score cards but still just content to make it to the decision. Champs just shut them down because nobody will take a chance. The WMMA stuff is still mostly terrible but the overall excitement and magic of the sport has been completely lost.
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^You picked the wrong weekend to start watching with the awesome cards we’ve had in Austin and Singapore lately.
I think the term is oversaturation actually.
I don’t think anyone disagrees that a lot of UFC cards feature fights that would not have been booked ten years ago.
At the same time while you might no like all the supply…its there for the demand. Organizations like Combate Americas, RIZIN, KSW etc… are not meeting the demands of 45 and 50 year old Americans who have followed NHB/MMA since 93, those cards meet the demand of a new market.
MMA might have sort of leveled out to a degree in the US over the past decade but markets like Poland, Australia, etc… have grown.
Sure there are some watered down cards but the talent pools in some weight classes are much larger than they used to be. World class athletes like Gokhan Saki, Ed Ruth and Aaron Pico are not just able to climb to the top as soon as they decide to fight… the sport has some impressive talent pools.
That being said I watch a lot less MMA than I used to and I miss the PRIDE GP’s as much as anyone and don’t enjoy WMMA in the UFC at all.
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Some of the loss of excitement and magic decline is also related to the age of the viewer, IMO.
Sports are most exciting when you are 15-30 years old. After that, things change for most men. Just the way it goes.
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100%…I made this point earlier…just because we’re old fucks now (I assume most of us are 40-50 years old based on the timeframes we’re nostalgic about) and we aren’t obsessed about MMA anymore doesn’t mean much…because there’s a fresh crop of 18-35 year olds that are as obsessed as we once were.
I told the story briefly in a thread, can’t remember if it was this one…but a young guy I’ve never talked MMA about randomly said on a team call at work something like “do any of you happen to watch the UFC” then went on to talk about how amazing Valentina is. We were once that…those young dudes who would randomly bring up MMA without knowing if anyone cared, and then would talk about how amazing our favorite fighter is while everyone else ignored us because they didn’t care. We’ve been replaced, gentlemen. There’s a new group of young people who think all the UFCs current champions belong in the GOAT discussion.
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Guard & closed guard fighting.
The cage is too wide. The rounds are too long. The rankings don’t matter.
Shrink the cage. Shrink the rounds. Use brackets.
Making these guys fight in a smaller cage has always felt to me like forcing NBA players to play on a high school sized court. Something about it just doesn’t feel right and it curbs the abilities of the most athletic and largest guys.
Not sure if mentioned but one sure way to make it really exciting again and to push the limits like we saw with the K1 GPs, PRIDE GPs, and the “heyday” of the UFC… when there was no USADA…is to set up either a separate no testing league and let’s see how beastly fighters we can get or just don’t test at all…
Why should a 50 yr old on TRT+ have higher levels than Jon Jones and DC lol?
I say unleash the beasts and…
Yes. I don’t even know the names anymore.
Soup du jour.
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I see your viewpoint. My protest to cage size comes down to the fact that I’m paying a premium to see a fight, not a footwork exhibition, dance-off, or cardiovascular stress-test. A shorter round with a shorter cage would require the athlete to work harder for the W and still give plenty of room for circling, side-stepping, stance-switching, takedown setups, and pop’n n lock’n should they insist we see that. A speedy divisional grand-prix format would be more exciting than the pseudo-WWE format we’re seeing now.
No more “I have 25 minutes.” All that does is benefit the title / ranking defender and rob the audience of peak performance rounds.
Fuck I’m old.
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Grand Prix’s never work because you always have fighters pull out. Every time. DC was the alternate in the Strikeforce Grand Prix, Bellator has had issues with champs pulling out of their tournaments… way I see it, there’s always some sort of tournament and bracket style type of competition going on behind the scenes, it’s just always more vague and it’s kinda your job to figure out how that bracket is set up. It works out well for the UFC brass, cuz they can insert fighters wherever they want, whenever they want and gives them the opportunity to move a guy ahead in the bracket structure and hold others back while dangling another and another fight ahead of them the entire time (Leon Edwards after beating Nate).
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I think the first round should be 10 mins like back in PRIDE. Shit, I think there is merit to the old school UFC rules where fighters fought to a finish and there was no time limit. Say maybe having 10 or 15 minute fights with no breaks at all. You either fight to a finish or the entire fight is scored as a whole similarly to PRIDE and ONE FC.
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Yes, anything that incentivizes action, penalizes inaction, creates momentum in the division, and keeps the audience interested. Another issue may be the “belt” itself. Injury and personality anomalies are far too common in MMA to insist that a division wait on the current champion. This would eliminate the issue of absent champions in a grand-prix format. Fight for the purse and a trophy.
I’m sure the UFC knows exactly what they’re doing and we’re stuck with the show as-it-is. MMA is trending toward parity with soccer. Muay Thai and Kickboxing are more exciting combat sports and I wish they had more popularity in the States.
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The PRIDE and DREAM GPs worked out pretty well.
The way the UFC runs things got two genders and twelve weight classes and they put eight or ten different weights on each Fight Night or PPV card and its impossible to follow for casuals.
Why do you think you hear even tons of UGers say “I don’t have a clue who anyone is anymore”, its partially because they only get to see one or two fights from a weight class each Saturday night and have to think about things that have happened over five months to know what has actually happened with ten or twelve high ranked fighters from a single division. With PRIDE and DREAM… you could watch all those twelve fighters fight in a single night. It was way better.
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UFC might have most of the talent but thank the MMA Gods that Bellator, ONE, RIZIN and PFL are at least still running some GP’s and tournaments that are 1000% easier for the general public to follow than the standard single fight format UFC follows.
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Is there a site that lists all upcoming shows for each franchise? I’d happily stop watching UFC and build my fight nights around other leagues.
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